Ranking well on Baidu

what are the factors?

[kbell]

Does anyone know of any concrete information (in English) about what factors influence high rankings in Baidu as compared to other engines like GG and YH? How is Baidu similar/different from the other engines in terms of what on and off page elements are important?

Some background: I'm an in-house SEO working across about 40 countries and we do fairly well on GG, MSN, YH worldwide, but Baidu has our .cn sites pretty much nowhere. I don't think there's a crawl problem (we've got plenty of pages in the index, all in Chinese), so I'm assuming it's something related to which factors weigh highest for Baidu. Is anyone ranking well in Baidu with tactics that are unusual for other engines?

thanks for sharing,
kate

[newviewit]

factors are personal connections within the company

[kbell]

Well that's certainly bad news for me. So you go through a local agency or something along those lines (not asking for recommended agencies, just generalities :))

[chinese_seo]

i think the local agency doesn't control that all the time because baidu has already gave up all her agency (reseller) for her platform.

To rank well, i think the contents and server location matters.

Good luck

[makemetop]

Remember that Baidu lists all sponsored listings before natural results - so if there are 10 or more sponsored listings - then the first organic results are on the 2nd page. Normally, sponsored listings appear on the left - where organic results appear on Google - on the right appear place booking advertisements.

[kbell]

Yes, I've seen that, but it's not clear to me if the number of sponsored listings is constant for a given keyword. Does it vary moment by moment depending on something (bids? bidders? whim?) or is the number of sponsored results something that should be taken into account when selecting keywords? For example, if it's a fixed number and I am looking at selecting keywords, I'd probably just eliminate keywords with 10 sponsored listings, even if they are big an important, but if the next day there might be just 2 sponsored listings, then that's another story.

[Cinaman]

IN BAIDU ,we can select time to show my AD.
when you see 2 sponsored listing,that is night in my country.

[seo4china]

Yes, as far as paid advertising is active for your keywords they will always show up on top of organic results. The only way for organic results to move up is if some advertisers pause or stop their ads.

From the Baidu PPC account the advertiser can actually choose which spot he want to be. The higher the spot, the higher the CPC.

For competitive keywords, SEO is pretty much worthless, you will need to open that Baidu PPC account to get a first page listing.

There are reports that for business related keywords, even if there is no or not enough advertisers, Baidu will manually push a site which has been doing organically pretty well down a couple of pages, just to force the owner to pay them for advertising...

[edited by: bill at 12:31 am (utc) on May 8, 2008]
[edit reason] see sticky mail [/edit]